Elden Ring creator Hidetaka Miyazaki is one of the greatest video game auteurs working today, a factotum genius with a compelling origin story who has done more to influence and elevate the medium of games than any other single individual in the last decade. Elden Ring is Miyazaki's first attempt at an open world game, the dominant and ubiquitous genre in triple A development and Elden Ring (the 'open world Dark Souls'), represents his most ambitious and enticing project to date.

For a long time whilst playing this impossibly vast (still an understatement) title, I and many other friends passionate about video games, considered the possibility that this could be the greatest video game ever made. It took everything that made the Dark Souls games so incredible - narrative ambiguity, gripping lore, labyrinthine level-design, aesthetic unity, synchronised mechanics and thematics - and cranked it up to 11 by massively increasing the scope. That it was seemingly able to do this without sacrificing the series' unparalleled quality and consistency was miraculous to an extent it became impossible not to resort to hyperbole.

Unfortunately, the game doesn't stick the landing. By the end, balance issues, repeated enemy types and recycled content serve to undermine the previously transcendent experience to remind you that Elden Ring is still an open world game (with all the negative associations that implies) and even a genius like Miyazaki cannot maintain the kind of quality control present across the linear titles from his oeuvre.

Criticisms aside, what we did get is so far in advance of everything else released this year and despite the end game roughness, Elden Ring remains undeniably one of gaming's finest achievements. A true paradigm shift for the medium, a seemingly once-in-a-generation recalibration of old ideas that takes those ideas to the next level. Many developers have tried to imitate Miyazaki's games on a mechanical level, and Elden Ring makes a hell of an argument that those pale imitations never stood a chance. Other studios will continue to struggle to figure out what made Dark Souls work for years to come, while Miyazaki's endless ambitious and near flawless execution continues to leave them as outstripped, outthought and outmanoeuvred as a first-time player about to face off with Malenia, Blade of Miquella for the 200th time.

Rating: 9.4

‘I Never Quite Realized ... How Beautiful This World Is.’

The most emotionally devestating, thematically sophisticated and fiercely outrè triple A video game ever made.